How To Fall Apart

This week's episode of How to Fall Apart, the Support Series, sponsored by @dunnesstores is The Work Episode. We talked to psychotherapist Jason Brennan, psychologist Aisling Leonard-Curtin and @MuireannO_C @FionnualaJay and @aislingmkeenan about dealing with the current stresses within the workplace, managing the lack of boundaries and switching off when working at home, and the impact on mental...

This week's episode of How to Fall Apart, the Support Series, sponsored by Dunnes Stores is about single parents. @liadanhynes spoke to Zoe Desmond, founder of @FroloApp Karen Kiernan of @1familyieland, Sam Dunne of @treoir, as well as clinical psychologist Rachel Warman, herself a single parent. We spoke about how to manage the issues facing single parents including loneliness, financial fears, a...

The first episode of How to Fall Apart - The Support Series, sponsored by Dunnes Stores is live now. For this six part series we’re asking the experts for advice on how to cope with the challenges we’re all facing. This episode focuses on children - how this affects them, how we can support them. We spoke to clinical psychologists Dr Tony Bates, Dr Nicola McGlade and Dr Olwyn Finnegan, as  we...

Our guest this week is designer, artist and mother of three Helen Steele. Helen talks about having ADHD, how even from the first day of school she felt like there was something different about her, about the anxiety it caused which subsequently led to her developing an eating disorder. She talked about how sport and art helped her cope, about having a baby and isolation in motherhood after she mov...

My guest on this week’s episode is Nadia Forde. We talked about her parents separation when she was seven, her subsequent estrangement from her mother, how she coped when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and letting go and accepting that their relationship might never be what she had hoped. We also chatted of course about Nadia’s experience on I’m A Celebrity, body shaming and her own...

We spoke to Jen O’Dwyer co-host of The Creep Dive and Mother of Pod, Soobie Lynch, @standingbythewall and all round creative genius, and Esther O’Moore Donohoe, host of podcasts the 80% and Esther is in Bits,  about when Christmas isn’t all joy and festivities, and it feels like the rest of the world is having the time of its life. We talked about when a family member is ill at Christmas time...

We did our first panel! Aisling Keenan Sarah Rickard and Dawn Nolan talked to me about freelancer fear- what it is and how to deal with it. We spoke about making the decision to go freelance (or having it made for you by redundancy), anxiety and the ways in which freelancing exacerbates that, the isolation of working on your own, talking about money, valuing yourself, the never-say-no freelancer m...

In this week's episode, boutique owner Mary Greene talks about her 10 year journey to conceive. It's an unconventional story with many highs and too many lows but an eventual surprise ending. 

My guest today is Zoe Desmond, the founder of Frolo, the single parent networking app. Zoe became a single parent two years ago when her son Billy was one. At the time she really struggled with the sense of isolation from not knowing any other single parents, the loneliness and the sense of otherness. After finding nothing online that would help her meet others in a similar situation, she went on...

Editor and journalist Yvonne Hogan speaks about losing her baby when nineteen weeks pregnant. “Grief is a physical thing, you can’t think your way out of it, you have no control over it,” she said in our interview. “Until something bad happens to you, you don’t realise bad things can happen. I just thought you got past twelve weeks and that was it.” We talked about the exhaustion of grief, about t...

Stylist Paula Hughes talks about her daughter Kayla being diagnosed with the rare degenerative brain disorder Rhett syndrome. About chasing a diagnosis, advocating for your child, how they taught Kayla to communicate, looking after your marriage while also caring for your child, raising a second child within this situation, about still finding the joy in life, and about how their daughter’s love o...

Someone recently asked Sophie and I if we ever run out of things to talk about, the answer is no. When we originally sat down to do an interview for HTFA, we chatted for nearly three hours. So we kept this second half for this week, when Sophie's first novel, Filter This, comes out. Sophie talks about her dad, Kevin Linehan, who died in 2017 after a long illness with alzheimer's. About when a loss...

Georgie Crawford was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017 when her daughter was just seven months old. A year after her treatment finished, she talks about coping with her diagnosis and her treatment, about mothering through sickness, and the aftermath of cancer-living with fear, the guilt and shame she sometimes feels around food, setting up her hugely successful podcast The Good Glow, and how th...

Our new episode of #howtofallapart is up now. Trigger warning, this episode is a conversation about life after suicide. I spoke to my friend make-up artist Eilis Downey, who two years ago lost her sister Lyn, who died by suicide.  “Knowing Lyn was to love her,” Eilis says. They had lived together, worked together and hung out together. In the aftermath, she said that she didn’t know how to be...

With her book #eatpraylove @elizabeth_gilbert_writer essentially wrote the manifesto for what to do when your life goes off the path you had expected it to go on. Here she talks about how her biggest mistake back then was thinking that she needed to stop going after one year. And that our lives don’t end in tidy happy ever after packages. We talked about her grief over the last year, in the wake o...

Journalist Elle Gordon was born with cerebral palsy and later developed hip dysplasia. She talked about feeling other, about the grief around letting go of expectations, on why acceptance is a process not a destination, and about talking honestly about living with a disability.

Our newest episode of #howtofallapart is up now with my brilliant friend and colleague journalist and author Emily Hourican, whose new book The Outsider is just out. Five years ago she was diagnosed with HPV mouth cancer. We talked about her husband David kept everything going so she could let all the balls drop, her treatment which involved her bolted to the table in a mask she compared to the ma...

Tv presenter Cassie Stokes talks about coping with the recent break-up of her relationship, speaking publicly about grief, coming out, and being “the gay one” on Xpose. How to Fall Apart is presented by @liadanhynes and produced by @talltalespodcasts

Founder of Our Table, activist and Social Democrat candidate Ellie Kisyombe talks about living for almost a decade in Direct Provision, in a life over which she has virtually no control. About the strength she draws from the memories of her family and her life in Africa, overcoming depression, the importance of your own home, raising children within the Direct Provision system where they do not ev...

Author and head of social media for everymum.ie Kate Gunn talks about how she put life back together after her marriage fell apart, about how grief can feel physically painful, how to mind your children through this process, learning to live without another adult, living with a spouse suffering from depression, about building a new home, dealing with panic attacks, and introducing your children to...

Author, journalist and podcast Sophie White talks about having a nervous breakdown in her early twenties, how recovery from mental health issues is an ongoing process rather than a one off thing, what to do when your sense of who you were deserts you, when depression looks like someone who is highly functioning, and post natal depression. How to Fall Apart is presented by @liadanhynes and produced...